Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

How Not to Run a Nation

By Alan
Caruba

The
political farce that ended 2012 and began 2013 has surely made the United
States a laughingstock among the nations of the world. The sharp divisions
between liberals and conservatives in Congress led to desperate last minute
negotiations to avoid a “fiscal cliff” that faced the nation’s taxpayers and
that still threatens default on our debts. The same battles will be fought again when
it comes time to raise the nation’s debt ceiling limit in two months.

This is a
Congress that has not passed a budget for three years.

This is no way to run a
nation!

By a vote
of 89-8 in the early hours of Tuesday, the Democrat-controlled Senate approved
a plan to raise taxes on families earning more than $250,000 and to postpone
sequester cuts for two months. By mid-afternoon, however, Politico.com reported
that “House Republicans are overwhelmingly opposed to
the Senate's bill to avert the fiscal cliff, making it nearly certain that
Speaker John Boehner's chamber will amend the legislation and send it back to
the Senate - a potentially serious blow to a package that appeared well on its
way to becoming law.”

“House
Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the No. 2 House Republican, told GOP
lawmakers that he was opposed to the legislation in its current form.
Republicans are chiefly concerned with the lack of spending cuts in the tax
bill.” And that has been the problem since Obama took office, too much spending
and too much borrowing to continue spending.

For the
year or more the “fiscal cliff” existed Congress chose to do nothing. The
frantic negotiations resulted in an agreement to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, something Democrats and the
President campaigned against for years.

Having to fight these
fiscal battles all over again in two months will only reaffirm that Congress is
incapable to arriving at common sense solutions. For the 47% of Americans who
pay no taxes, the discussion is a distraction from watching the bowl games and
other diversions.

It is
useful to review the Heritage Foundation analysis issued prior to the late
night vote. Amy Payne spelled it out in a recent commentary, saying “Tax hikes
are the centerpiece of the problem” warning that the largest tax increase in
American history was scheduled to kick in on January 1.

While the
Bush tax cuts remain, solutions are needed to resolve what to do with the
payroll tax, the alternative minimum tax patch, and a host of other tax policies
that were scheduled to expire at year’s end.

However,
twenty tax increases built into Obamacare are scheduled to go into effect. They
will generate a trillion dollar increase for the years 2013-2022. Curiously, a
tax on medical instruments that covers everything from tongue depressors to MRI
machines will make healthcare more expensive for everyone despite the claim
that Obamacare would make healthcare more affordable.

As the
Heritage Foundation and others have been shouting from the housetops, Obamacare
raises the hospital insurance (HI) portion of the payroll tax on wage income
over $250,000 from 2.9 percent to 3.8 percent. It then applies that 3.8 percent
rate to investment income-capital
gains and dividends—for anyone earning above $250,000.

Tax
experts like Curtis Dubay, a senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation,
points out that “this is a massive policy change, since it represents the first
time the payroll tax will apply to investment income.” He calls the investment
income HI tax “a dangerous step down a slippery, tax-hiking slope”, predicting
that “the economy will suffer, because incentives to work and invest will fall.
Less work and investment will mean that businesses create fewer jobs and pay
their existing workers less than they otherwise would have.”

Dubay
refutes President Obama’s claim that his plan for taxing the rich would just be
a return to the rates that existed under President Clinton. “That is flat out
incorrect,” noting that Obama is ignoring the tax hikes hidden in Obamacare.

Stephen
Moore, a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and a senior
economics writer, a regular commentator on CNBC-TV and Fox News, has a new book
out, “Who’s the Fairest of the Them All? The Truth About Opportunity, Taxes, and
Wealth in America.” ($21.50, Encounter Books). It blessedly brief, but it
covers a lot of ground, especially as regards the lies coming out of the White
House about the “rich.”

A lot of
Americans are oblivious to the fact that the President is operating from an
ideology that is the opposite of everything that built the greatest economy the
world has ever seen. His views are those of a Socialist or to put it more
bluntly, a Communist. He stops short of initiating programs by which the
government would nationalize all industries, but Obamacare in effect does that
for the health care industry; twenty percent of the nation’s economy.

In his
book, Moore defends the free enterprise system as “the on-ramp to economic
progress and rising incomes.” Under President Obama, “the ranks of the poor
have risen and the progress of the middle class has stalled in the United
States in recent years because we have moved so aggressively away from free
markets and toward ham-handed government solutions.”

The lies
the President told all through his 2008 campaign and the last four years of his
first term have all been intended to create class warfare. Moore points out
that “Mr. Obama says that in recent decades the middle class has suffered and
shrunk. He is dead wrong on this count. In fact, the last thirty years (up
until the 2008 recession) have been a boom period for the middle class.”

The proof
of that, Moore notes, “By 2011, after Mr. Obama’s first three full years in
office, and after nearly two years of radical spending and taxing policies, the
median American family incomes declined
by almost $4,500 for every household. The poverty rate increased, and so did
the number of Americans losing their homes. Yes, Mr. Obama inherited an
economic mess, but his policies have done little to stop the decline.”

Throughout
2012, according to Obama, if you earn more than $250,000 you are among the
“rich” in America. This is surely a redefining of what we used to consider
rich; usually those earning a million or more. As things stand now “Our
government,” says Moore, “relies for more than 50 percent of its revenue on the
richest three percent.”

The tax
rate increase on “the rich” that Obama has been demanding would raise enough
revenue to run the nation for about a week. Meanwhile, the U.S. must borrow
$4.8 billion every day just to meet its expenses.

Obama’s
goals since becoming President can be found in the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” and
I recommend you get familiar with it as the nation hurtles toward financial
collapse because that is exactly what the strategy is intended to bring about
in order to impose a total socialist/communist system on the world’s greatest
capitalistic economy.

Among the
strategy’s proposals was a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare
rolls” and we have seen this in the expansion of the food stamp program and
loosening of requirements for those on welfare to seek employment. The goal of
the Cloward-Piven strategy is to ultimately “sabotage and destroy the welfare
system in order to ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the
nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would ‘the rest of society’
accept their demands.”

That is
Obama’s definition of “fairness” and it exists today as half of society, those
with jobs or self-employed, are having their income taxed to pay for government
programs for those who do not work or cannot find work; an estimated 26 million
are unemployed or stopped looking for work. Another 47 million are using food
stamps, a program that has greatly expanded during Obama’s first term and which
uses television commercials to encourage more people to sign on.

A recent
Rasmussen Reports poll noted that 73% of likely voters want government spending
cut.They sense the danger of a
government grown so large it threatens the economy and, indeed, enforcement of
the Constitution’s limits on government.

It has
become a cliché to say the problem is government spending, but the problem is
government spending.

There are
a variety of scenarios regarding the near future and among them is the collapse
of the U.S. dollar. Should that occur there would be wide-spread panic and demands
that the government “do something.” One massive form of control has already
been imposed in the form of Obamacare. When the government can determine who
lives or dies, or how much care they can receive, Americans have lost a
precious freedom. Other freedoms would be lost.

Obama has
found ways to worsen the financial crisis and it has been deliberate. He is not
merely “transforming” America, he is destroying it.

What's more worrying is that most of the GOP senators voted for the package which is set to raise $41 in taxes to every $1 cut in spending! The GOP sure know how to commit suicide. It's time for a new conservative party methinks. It'll take a few years of conservatives being in the wilderness, but the GOP are going the same route as the Whig party unless they start seeing what's before their eyes.

@All. Yes, Congress is composed of idiots mostly, but it appears that the GOP conservatives have decided to fight NOW instead of put it off until later. That's a good thing. The problem, however, is that Obama has gotten his tax hikes so he is happy for now.

@Ron. I am sure Obama & gang have a contingency plan for an economic collapse starting with martial law, seizing everyone's assets, etc. It could get very ugly or everyone could just roll over.

Sadly, America's low information voters won't understand a word of this Alan. Until the chickens come home to roost, and the economy is collapsing around them, they will continue to vote for the people who tell them the biggest lies. It's going to be a rough ride until them in my opinion ....

Yes, I'm sure the Obama Regime has war gamed their "radical agenda item number one" to collapse the U.S. economy.

This action will lead inevitably to an insurrection by low income people (and many middle class people) who depend on a monthly government check.

In the words of the Communist Van Jones, the plan for their revolution is: "Bottom up, top down, inside and out."

In other words, the insurrection starts with major urban riots, the government responds with martial law and flooding the streets with police; never one to let a good crisis go to waste, the Obama Regime uses martial law to seize private firearms, shut down free discussion on the Internet, impose censorship and begin mass arrests of opponents to the Regime using lists of names and addresses already prepared by DHS.

Then what?

Yes, the federal government can come down like a ton of bricks, but there will be blowback...civil war, perhaps.

And the thing about war of any type is that it's like starting a forest fire - easy to start, but impossible to control.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.